MSN is a very long standing Microsoft brand with a lot of history and legacy stuff around for it. In particular, membercenter.msn.com is filled to the brim with ancient artifacts of a bygone era. This is a spin-off of the Microsoft Morgue article, because there's so much here to show off that it'd completely take over that page.
This website is intended to host downloads for software such as MSN Explorer, an old piece of software which is included with MSN Premium, a subscription service which Microsoft still apparently sells despite being extremely outdated and having a lot of pointless features which are included for free in web browsers and Microsoft Windows.
This page is dedicated to cataloging all of the strange things I've found on the MSN member center which haven't been updated in years, along with some other MSN sites.
The default page you are redirected to when visiting the MSN member center. When the sign in button is clicked, you are redirected to a live.com sign in page. When I log into my Microsoft account, I get a "subscription not supported" error, saying the subscription isn't available for my membership type (likely because I don't have a MSN Premium subscription). However, signing in provides three new links, to contant MSN support, download MSN software, and to order an MSN CD. Support redirects to support.msn.com, which is no longer online. The other two go to the next two websites decribed.
This page has one download link for "MSN software". The system requirements are hilariously small, requiring Windows 7 or above, at least 128 MB of RAM, and a 0.5Ghz CPU. The install button leads to https://g.msn.com/1csinstlr_/enus, which downloads an installer file for MSN Explorer.
The integrated web browser is unsurprisingly Internet Explorer 11 (or whatever IE version is installed on your system). If you click on one of the links on the sign in box, you'll be brought to a dedicated web browser window. By navigating Microsoft's website, you can get to Bing and from there, go anywhere you want. Here's the user agent string.
Unfortunately, the installer seems to get stuck after you sign into your Microsoft account. For me, it just displayed a blank gray box.
Unfortunately, the link for this site is dead, so you can't order an MSN CD. You just get a certificate error preventing you from connecting. Maybe there's some way to bypass this? The last time this page was archived was June 1st, 2024, but for some reason the formatting is broken. Here's the latest archive with correct formatting: Internet Archive Link